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I'm a very amateur swimmer and I try to understand why people drown from cramp in one leg? Because me being a novice, I learned how to swim without using the legs too much (mainly because it takes skill to coordinate everything well) and one of the very first things was me floating by turning my head hard backwards while standing vertically in the water and sinking in water up to the nose, basically sticking as little of my face above water as possible and IIRC I was floating fine with very little help from hands and no use of the feet at all. That seemed easy, especially in dense cold water..

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My lifeguard mother almost drowned from a leg cramp (see my sibling comment), she explained that the pain of movement becomes so unbearable that your body basically goes into the fetal position and sinks to the bottom.

I occasionally wake up from extreme leg cramps. It literally feels like someone is taking a knife on the serrated edge and pulling it down from the top of your calf muscle for a solid 20 seconds. All you can do is writhe in agony and scrounge up into a ball because naturally that is your response. After it's over you're in a ton of fatigue, your heart is racing, and just want to rest. Now do that in a pool.

Ok, I understand.. it seems I had milder versions of cramps. The one I remember the most was when I basically had to grab the toes of my foot and pull hard counter to the cramping muscle and basically it ceased after several seconds. It was very painful but I didn't know they can be paralyzing.

This kind of extreme cramp is known as a "charley horse", if you want more information.

Used to get that a lot. Leg once cramped super hard which smashed my knee into a metal railing. Double agony that night.

  Magnesium supplements really helped a lot. Later on, stretching lots and lots of stretching.  Now a massage gun.  Cramps are a thing of the past.

I get those in bed from time to time and my course of action is to keep the leg strait during the onset, get out of bed and stand up stretching the leg muscle. The pain can be very intense but once I stand up and apply pressure by standing on the leg, it almost immediately stops the cramp and the pain subsides within a few seconds.

I used to let the leg contract and curl up powering through the cramp pain until it subsided but a few times it lasted over a minute which is agonizing.

Sometimes I get leg cramps in bed and I've found that I have to pull my toes upward to make it recover. Doing that seems to release whatever is cramping up for me after a few seconds.

I used to have to get out of bed and stand on it before I discovered the other trick.

Same here, have also tried that in the water, but didn't work that time. I get the feeling that some of the cramps people talk about here are worse though, or perhaps it's also about how much pain you can stand or how you react to such a situation in general.

Yeah, I don't think mine have ever felt like a serrated blade going through my leg, as another comment here mentioned, so probably not quite as bad. But it's definitely bad enough that I can't use the leg properly and it seems to manifest when I move my leg just wrong somehow, even in bed.

The trick to pull the tip of my foot backwards really helped a lot because then I don't have to try to stand or anything.

I've never had a cramp like that in water, thankfully.

As a young adult, I had the same problem once or twice per week. There are many potential causes, but I was lucky to find the cause of mine on the first try (after suffering with them for a few years). Now I take a daily potassium supplement. (One 550mg tablet of potassium gluconate daily.) I haven't had a leg cramp for decades.

Aye! That's it usually- electrolytes.

Lack of hydration has also caused me light cramps. E.g: I was too excited about learning to surf to want go out of the water one summer. Plain water did the trick for me there.

You could try using a salt substitute like nusalt or lite salt. They contain potassium chloride. Cheap easy way to remember to get potassium, just eat.

it doesn't take much movement to get a cramp. the few times that i had a cramp, i was doing things like getting out of bed or standing up from a chair. horribly painful and the only thing you can do is to stop moving and try to relax.

if you do that in the water, you sink. by the time you realize that this was a bad idea it's to late. i can imagine that the pain would distract me to much to be able to focus and use my arms to keep me afloat. never mind that i'd probably also not think about taking a deep breath to get enough air before sinking.

Hm, maybe that's why - see my other comment, I 've had a few cramps while swimming and I've handled them without help, but I get those cramps out of the water also (especially when I stretch my legs during sleep) and I can actually feel them coming and I know what to do: the cramping muscle fights to pull the leg one way, I fight to extend it the other way. Eventually, I win, although it hurts like hell. Obviously I roll about in the water when I do that, but I don't have to sink, I can use my other leg and arms to float.

Anyway maybe that's something that can be trained?

(btw, this is not a humblebrag. I'm dumb enough that I almost drowned at least once and it was 100% just being dumb. Just nothing to do with cramps.)

Edit: I realised you can feel cramps coming by speaking with a friend who's a bodybuilder. He related a story where he felt a cramp coming in the middle of a set of squats and thankfully recognised it in time to place the bar on the hooks. When I first started having cramps I paid attention and you can actually feel the muscle tensing up so there's time to react to it, although I don't know how you can avoid the tearing pain. I only know to try and unlock the muscle by pushing the other way and massaging it.

Edit 2: Oh, er. There's menstrual cramps of course. I'm lucky not to get those. I don't think you can "push the other way" with them. Ugh.

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